A woman who managed to evade security to be a stowaway on a New York-to-Paris flight last month claims she’d tried to sneak into secure areas of other US airports before.
Svetlana Dali, 57, told investigators that she had tried to travel for free at several domestic airports, Assistant US attorney Brooke Theodora said at a bail hearing.
According to a criminal complaint, Dali flew to Paris as a stowaway on a Delta Air Lines flight on 26 November, before returning to Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday.
The document said she snuck past Transportation Security Administration officers by hiding amid a flight crew entering a special lane for airline employees. So she underwent security screening but never had to display a ticket.
She then dodged airline employees scanning tickets to board a flight bound for Charles de Gaulle Airport, only to be discovered aboard the plane illegally once it was in the air, the complaint says.
When the flight arrived in Paris on 27 November, French law enforcement authorities met her at the gate and detained her before she entered customs.
Concerns were raised that Dali might flee while awaiting trial.
Theodora said those attempts included one last February at Miami International Airport, where Dali was turned away as she tried to sneak into a secure area by going through a customs processing area to reach departing flights.
The prosecutor made the remarks as she urged that bail conditions be strict enough to ensure Dali, an unemployed Russian woman with permanent US residency, would attend her court hearings.
Dali, who wore a brown jailhouse uniform and entered court limping with a cane, spoke to her lawyer through a Russian interpreter.
Judge Joseph A Marutollo agreed to release Dali with electronic monitoring and strict pre-trial conditions, including a ban from all airports and a requirement that she live at the Philadelphia home of a man she met at church functions and submit to a curfew.
He also told her that she must undergo any mental health treatment required by the pre-trial services department, an arm of Brooklyn federal court.
Her court-appointed lawyer, Michael Schneider, said that his client, who has no criminal history after being a permanent resident of the US for more than a decade, was involved in “what could have been an aberrant act in a certain mental health state that’s not going to happen in the future.”
At a hearing on Thursday, Schneider said the charge against her was minor and that her offense was comparable to jumping a turnstile to enter the city’s subway system.
Theodora objected to the comparison at Friday’s hearing, saying the offense was serious and raised “very significant national security concerns and very significant public security risks for obvious reasons”.
Schneider said on Friday in court that the stowaway charge was unlikely to result in a prison sentence “unless she does something stupid”.
Delta Air Lines has said in a statement that a review concluded that its security infrastructure was sound and that “deviation from standard procedures is the root cause of this event”.
It said it was taking measures to ensure such a breach does not occur again.
“Nothing is of greater importance than safety and security,” the airline said.